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205. Michael Tymn Explores the Forgotten History of Psychic Mediums

Interview with author and parapsychology investigator Michael Tymn examines the work of Leonora Piper.

Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Michael Tymn author of, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife. During the interview Tymn talks about his research:

Alex Tsakiris: There are two ways we can look at this turn of the 20th century history. We can look at it in terms of forgotten history, which is the angle you take. If only we could go back. If an honest person, an open-minded person would look at this data it’s pretty hard not to be extremely aware that there is a significant amount of this history that’s been lost.

But, I’ve got to wonder if there isn’t a totally different way of looking at this history. Isn’t it a textbook game plan for the kind of scientism, for the spirit of denial that we live in today? If you want to look at how to take overwhelmingly significant evidence and bury it, sweep it under the rug, and embarrass all the people who’ve touched it, here’s the way to do it.

Mike Tymn: I agree. That’s one of the reasons I wrote this book and the four other books that I’ve written. It’s to try and resurrect this stuff because it’s so little-known. I’ve talked to a number of parapsychologists and they don’t know it themselves. I remember one who didn’t even know who Frederic Myers was. You talk about Leonora Piper, Sir Oliver Lodge, or Gladys Osborne Leonard, they’re all names they recognize but they don’t know any of the history. I don’t know what they teach them when they’re pursuing their degrees in parapsychology but they seem to avoid the early stuff.

Today we welcome Michael Tymn to Skeptiko. Mike is the author of several books relating to afterlife communication and mediumship including, The Articulate Dead, The Afterlife Revealed, and his latest that we’re going to talk about today, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife. It’s a book published by White Crow Books which is a place where you’ll also find Mike’s excellent blog.

Mike, welcome back to Skeptiko. It’s great to talk to you again.

Mike Tymn: Thank you very much for having me on, Alex.

Alex Tsakiris: So you’ve written this book about Lenora Piper, someone who many people who are interested in mediumship and history in general might know, but I think there are a lot of people who don’t know who Leonora Piper was. I guess that’s the natural place to start.

Mike Tymn: Leonora Piper was an American woman born in Nashua, New Hampshire in 1859. She discovered her mediumistic ability sometime around 1883 when she was 24. Her father-in-law had suggested that she see a psychic healer for some problem that she was having at the time. While she was seeing the psychic healer, she dropped off into a trance and she started giving information to another person in the room at the time, a doctor, about his deceased son. So that’s how she came to realize that she had mediumistic ability.

Then she started experimenting with it now and then with friends. Somewhere along the line that first year, William James’ mother—William James being a Professor of Psychology at Harvard—had a sitting with Leonora and found it very evidential and told her husband, William James, all about it. So William James had his own sitting and was very much impressed. As a result, he signed up Leonora to be a research subject for the next 18 years or so.

Alex Tsakiris: It’s Leonora, so I apologize for that. I’ll have to do that correctly from here on out.

I do feel we need to lay the backdrop here, right? She goes on to become the white crow that many people who know William James know his famous quote about there only needing to be one white crow to prove not all crows are black. He’s really talking about psychic ability and ability to talk with the dead. But the timeframe that we’re really talking about here and the backdrop of that is interesting because we’re coming out of a period with Darwinism, with reason, with a move away from religious thought into this explosion of scientific free-thought. Now here are these folks at the same time who start getting this inkling that this spiritualism might have some real legs to it.

Can you fill in some of the history gaps that I’m leaving out there?

Mike Tymn: Sure. First of all, as far as Mrs. Piper’s first name, it’s either Lenora or Leonora. Lenora was her nickname and Leonora was her full name so either one is correct.

As far as psychical research, the foremost psychical research didn’t really begin until 1882, when the Society for Psychical Research was formed in London. Three years later the American branch was also formed. It really goes back into the 11th Century, I guess you could say, when the Catholic Church was setting down formal guidelines for investigation of miracles involving saints.

Then we jump up to 1741 or thereabouts when Emanuel Swedenborg was doing his own personal investigation of afterlife realms by means of clairvoyant and out-of-body experiences or whatever he was doing. He was going into the heavens and reporting on it. It wasn’t research of anybody else. It was his own personal research. Swedenborg is sometimes called the first spiritualist.

Then we jump up to the key event on March 31, 1848 which was the Fox sisters in Hydesville, New York. That sort of kicked everything off. I’m sure many of your listeners have heard that story. There are questions about it, but in effect they heard knocks around the house and they had been hearing them for a number of weeks. All of a sudden these two young girls realize that they could communicate with the knocks. They’d get three knocks and knock back a certain number of times and get the same number of knocks back.

Then they realized that if they asked a question and said, “Give me three knocks for a yes and one knock for a no,” or something to that effect that they could get an intelligent response. They called this to the attention of their parents and the parents experimented. It just took off from there, not only in Hydesville, New York but within a year this was going on all around the world, at least the Western world.

People started looking into it and one of the first to look into it was Judge John Edmonds, who was a Supreme Court justice in New York. He was probably the first real psychical researcher. Edmonds sat with dozens of mediums. He thought it was all bunk initially but he soon came to believe it. He wrote the first real book on psychical research called, Spiritualism.

There are several others in the 1850s, Robert Hare, who was a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. He got into it because he wanted to debunk it. He thought it was just so much “madness” and he was out to put a stop to it but he became a believer after sitting with 22 or 23 different mediums.

Then over in France there was Alan Kardec. He was conducting his own investigation and he also became a believer.

We go into the 1860s and we’ve got Alfred Russel Wallace, who was the co-originator with Charles Darwin of the Natural Selection Theory. He was a total skeptic and after sitting with a number of mediums he also joined the believers.

Up until 1870, that’s when the founders of the SPR, Society for Psychical Research, began to take an interest in the matter. Frederic Myers, who was a lecturer at Cambridge, a poet, his friend Edmund Gurney, and Henry Sidgwick, they became interested and began sitting with mediums. Then in 1882 they decided they needed a formal, peer-reviewed group to take a look at this material. That pretty much kicked off formal psychical research.

As far as the times were concerned, it should be pointed out that the 1870s was really a time of despair. Myers talks about this quite a bit and William James does, too. It took about 10 years for Darwinism to really kick in and even before Darwinism, as you know, it was the Age of Reason, the Age of Enlightenment and so forth. People were falling away from the churches.

Darwinism was sort of a knock-out blow. People thought if the world wasn’t created the way the Bible says then the whole Bible must be wrong. This resulted in many people, especially the educated people, falling away from the church and having nothing else to fall back on. As a result, there was a lot of what William James called “soul sickness.” James himself said he suffered from soul sickness at the time and had considered committing suicide.

Alex Tsakiris: Does James and do other intellectuals at that time make that that connection between this nihilistic, Atheistic movement that’s going on that’s behind Darwinism and this soul sickness or this malaise that’s falling over people—is the connection understood at that point?

Mike Tymn: They understood. They were looking for meaning to life. A meaning to life that seemed to have disappeared with Darwinism and the downfall of the Church. They don’t always come out and say, “We’re looking for evidence of the survival of consciousness at death.” In fact, the SPR when it was formed in 1882, they carefully avoided saying that they were looking for evidence for survival. They said, “We’re looking into thought transference,” which was a term they used back then which was later named telepathy.

Alex Tsakiris: Mike, I think you point this out in your book and correct me if I’m wrong. Part of the reason they’re going down the telepathy route when they’re first investigating these mediums, it sounds almost so current, you know? It’s a repeat of so much of the research that’s been going on in the last 20 years. That’s that it’s more scientifically acceptable in a kind of strange way to say, “Oh, it’s this ESP thing that we don’t understand,” than to say it’s the survival of consciousness thing that we don’t understand. Do I have that right?

Mike Tymn: Yeah, I think that’s the case. It’s just more scientifically acceptable today to talk about telepathy than it is to talk about survival.

Alex Tsakiris: Even to the point where a lot of NDE researchers won’t go there when the connection is even more obvious. I mean, I still don’t understand how you can talk about near-death experience research and not immediately jump to at least dealing with some of the philosophical issues concerning survival. Yet that’s where a lot of folks feel they need to go and dance around that whole survival issue. So this was also very much on the minds of these researchers, in particular William James as he started this research at Harvard in 1885, is that right?

Mike Tymn: That’s right.

Alex Tsakiris: You told us just a minute ago how this research starts. Maybe go over that period again. What is James trying to do and then he locks onto Leonora Piper and then where does it go from there?

Mike Tymn: Well, Leonora Piper was probably the best medium that he had come across, at least in the United States. There were a couple in England that other people were looking at but he didn’t have time to do an extensive study with Leonora Piper so he helped organize the American branch of the Society for Psychical Research. They brought in Dr. Richard Hodgson, who was an Australian who was lecturing in England. He was primarily a law professor and in England he had debunked a number of mediums and also went to India and supposedly debunked Madame Blavatsky. They pretty much assumed that Hodgson was going to debunk Piper.

Alex Tsakiris: Let’s talk about that for a minute because this is a fascinating aspect, especially when Hodgson comes back later in this story, both literally comes back and figuratively comes back into the story. Here’s a guy who, as you just mentioned, goes into this with a track record of shooting down these mediums. He goes in scientifically or with the legal background that he has saying, “I know enough to find the fraud, find the trickery, and expose it.” It’s not like he’s opposed to doing this research. He just doesn’t believe that it’s possibly true and he’s the perfect guy for James to tap to go and say, “Look at my white crow here and show me if she’s legit.”

Mike Tymn: Right. Hodgson had an open mind, I think. I can’t think of the person’s name offhand who was really President of the American branch of the SPR at the time, but he was out to debunk Mrs. Piper, too. His brother had been taken by a medium and he thought it was all bunk. I think he had more to do with choosing Hodgson than James did.

Alex Tsakiris: Interesting. Tell us a little bit about that first reading Hodgson gets with Leonora Piper. You document it in the book and it’s quite fascinating.

Mike Tymn: Well, I should explain. Mrs. Piper went into a trance. People don’t realize it and they think mediums today—they see John Edwards and Lisa Williams and James Van Praagh and so forth on television and they think that clairvoyant type mediumship represents all of the old mediumship when it doesn’t. It’s really quite a bit different.

Mrs. Piper was a trance medium. She would sit down and it would take her a minute or two to go into a trance state. Her eyes would roll back into her head and all of a sudden her voice would change if it was a male. That’s what Hodgson was looking at, this woman speaking to him in another voice. The voice in this case was that of Fred, his boyhood playmate. Fred gave out some little details as to what they did when they were boys playing leapfrog. Fred actually had a fatal injury when he was 14 or something like that. There were other evidential details. I don’t recall them right now, but that got Hodgson to thinking maybe there was something to this.

Alex Tsakiris: You know, Mike, it’s interesting. I just finished an interview with Dr. Julie Beischel, who you know, of course. You wrote a nice blurb for her recent book. In talking to Julie, we were talking about this topic of your first reading and a reading with a medium who gives you information that’s just highly evidential, that just makes you go, “Whoa! There is just no way.” It’s usually personal information and that’s how it was with Hodgson, too. He touches on some of the information from his first love that he doesn’t even want to share but it obviously affects him deeply.

Julie mentioned this as well; I think this idea of getting around the trickery of a cold reading is something that isn’t that hard to do, right? You don’t give out a lot of information and also the information that comes through, if it’s of a very personal nature that no one else could know you immediately are a convert. It sounds like in a lot of ways that’s what happens to Hodgson.

He’s a very intelligent guy. That’s another thing that comes through. These people are not–I don’t want to say they’re not inferior to us. You read them intellectually, they’re probably superior to us in a lot of ways, certainly in their writing and their speaking. I’d hate to have an email exchange with any of these people because I’d just be embarrassed by my grammar and my language. These were very intelligent people.

So here’s a guy who has a reading and says, “Wow. There’s something here. I need to investigate it.” What happens after that?

Mike Tymn: After that they actually signed up Mrs. Piper to a contract and Hodgson began sitting with her three times a week on the average. For 18 years he sat with her. Outside of a couple of trips she took to England, he had hundreds of sittings with her. He would arrange for other people to come in and sit with her. He would be present. He would sit there and take notes and record all of this stuff.

One of the problems with that type of research is that they didn’t really keep count. Julie has told you probably and told me that her type of research you can put some statistical numbers to it and come out and say it’s 70% correct here and 60% correct there. Chance guessing would only be 5% or whatever. Whereas they didn’t really do that with Piper. You’ve got to look at the whole research to see and ask yourself if it’s possible that this information could have come through by pure guessing.

One of the big problems was that William James didn’t seem to get this. In the research William James keeps talking about Mrs. Piper fishing for information but she really wasn’t fishing. One of the reasons I wrote the book is because the scientific writers, they don’t really set the foundation or give you the background. It took me three or four readings of the SPR records before I began to figure out what was going on. I didn’t know the difference between a direct voice medium and a trance voice medium when I first read it. That was confusing to me.

Alex Tsakiris: Tell us, what are the differences there?

Mike Tymn: A trance voice medium is one where the communication actually comes from her mouth. She goes into a trance and supposedly the spirit entity takes over her body and speaks right through her own mouth.

In direct voice, the voice is coming from another part of the room and comes through a trumpet or something that magnifies the voice. The medium can be sitting there talking to somebody next to her and the voice is still coming through usually two or three feet above her or him and off to the right. So it’s not coming through the medium herself. The direct voice is sometimes called “independent voice.” It comes from some point in the air above the medium.

At the time I was reading this I was reading some things about direct voice mediums as well as trance voice and it just didn’t really sink in as to what the difference was.

The biggest thing that they didn’t explain was the control aspect. They keep talking about Mrs. Piper’s early control was a person called Dr. Phinuit. At times they would say, “Dr. Phinuit said this.” Other times they’d say, “Leonora Piper said this.” It was very confusing. That whole control process was never really explained.

What happens is that on the Other Side, the spirit communicators, very few of them are able to speak through mediums for some reason or other. I think they have to put themselves into an altered state of consciousness in order to communicate and it’s like humans trying to meditate. There’s only a certain small percentage of humans that are able to effectively meditate. I think that’s the same on the Other Side. There’s only a small percentage of spirits who can put themselves into this altered state of consciousness that allows them to communicate through a medium.

Alex Tsakiris: At one point in the book you talk about mediums on the Other Side. We should add that this is all just your gleaning this from these reports of these folks so it’s not like you’re saying this is true. It’s just their research that you’ve gone back and tried to sort through and give us the best you can.

Go back to that point where they talk about mediums on the Other Side. That is, spirit mediums who are helping spirits on the Other Side connect with the human medium on this side. Do I have that right?

Mike Tymn: That’s right. That’s what they call the control. The control was the medium on the Other Side. What the control would do is get the information from the spirit that was communicating. He would then pass it through the medium and then on to the sitter so that there was a lot of distortion going on. First of all, apparently the control doesn’t receive the information from the spirit communicator verbally.

It’s by thought transference so a lot of time the control, Dr. Phinuit being the early control, he had to interpret what the spirits were telling him. Frequently he didn’t interpret it correctly and he would fish. So William James thought Mrs. Piper was fishing but Dr. Phinuit was actually occupying Mrs. Piper’s body and he was doing the fishing. He was trying to figure out what is this spirit trying to tell me? I’m not getting it clearly. So he would fish from the spirit, not the sitter, and that’s what James never got clearly or never stated clearly. Hodgson and later Dr. James Hyslop who succeeded Hodgson, they saw it very clearly that Mrs. Piper was not fishing. It was the spirit control who was fishing for information.

Alex Tsakiris: You know, Mike, you’ve mentioned William James a couple of times now in less than glowing terms, which he’s always referred to, and you’ve written an interesting blog post a while back that I remember the title of because it sticks in my head. It was, “Is William James a Wimp?” I’d like to go into that for a minute because I think you come to the conclusion that William James, although he stepped into this territory that was even at the time toxic career-wise. He was brave enough to go there. He maybe didn’t go as far as he could have in terms of advancing this whole area and elevating it to a scientific level that would change the world more. Tell us about that.

Mike Tymn: He didn’t want to have his reputation damaged by coming out and saying, “Yes, I believe in spirits and spirits are communicating.” That might have ended his academic career. Even today, as Julie and many others will tell you, if you start talking about spirits in an academic setting you’re risking losing your job. It was much more so, I guess, back then so he had to sit on the fence.

Reading between the lines with William James, I think he believed in spirits. He made a number of statements that said he was leaning in that direction. But he didn’t come directly out like Hodgson and Hyslop and Sir Oliver Lodge and Frederick Myers. They all started as skeptics and at some point in time they said, “Okay, I’ve got enough. I now believe that spirits are communicating with us. I believe in life after death.” James never said that. He just continued to sit on the fence the whole time.

Alex Tsakiris: I think a lot of times it seems like these researchers want to go two ways. One is to play it tight to the vest like William James did. In reading between the lines you can almost read this assumption that they have that in the long run this will play out. There’s enough evidence behind this, I don’t need to stick my neck out all the way. It’s just going to get chopped off. It won’t advance the cause. Let me play this middle ground here even though that’s not what I really believe. In the long run that will get us closer.

The other person is the convert who say, “We can’t live in this world of hall of mirrors where we don’t say what we’ve really found and we need to come out and report it.” Don’t you see that same thing going on today?

I guess you can make a case for either one. Sometimes if the public at large isn’t ready to accept an idea, maybe it isn’t best to go out with it too boldly.

Mike Tymn: Yeah. I think we just keep re-inventing the wheel. To give you an example, there’s an anthology of spiritual things being put together by a professor in Northern California. I was asked to write a 5,000 word essay on ectoplasm. So I put it together and sent it to the professor. He said, “It’s not balanced enough. You’ve got to put more of the skeptic’s view into it.”

I pointed out to him that the researchers that I cited, which were Richetand Gustav Geley, and all those who did a lot of research with mediums who were giving off ectoplasm, they started as skeptics. They had already ruled out the skeptical side of it. So why do I have to bring in skeptics who saw it only one time or had this idea that it wasn’t true because there’s no natural cause for it or whatever? I said, “It’s already been addressed.” It’s this need for balance.

Alex Tsakiris: It’s a false balance. It’s an artificial balance and it’s really a sleight-of-hand in turning science on its head. It’s the Dr. Richard Wiseman quote that says, “Hey, ESP has been proven by the normal standards of science but that raises the question, do we need a different standard?” I think that gets repeated over and over again.

I guess I’d pull back from that and ask about the purpose of your book in general. Mike, you’ve done a yeoman’s job of chronicling this aspect of history, looking at it in a number of different ways that no one else has pulled together. You have an interesting perspective in this book, Resurrecting Leonora Piper.

You know, I think there are two ways we can look at all of this information about this period. We can look at it in terms of forgotten history, which I think the angle you take of if only we could go back and an honest person, an open-minded person would look at this data it’s pretty hard not to be extremely aware that there is a significant amount of this history that’s been lost.

I’ve got to wonder if there isn’t a totally different way of looking at this history and that’s almost like a textbook game plan for the kind of scientism, for the kind of spirit of denial that we live in today. I mean, it’s almost like if you want to look at how to take overwhelmingly significant evidence and bury it, sweep it under the rug and embarrass all the people who’ve touched it, here’s the way to do it. Just go back and look at this part of history.

Mike Tymn: I agree. That’s one of the reasons I wrote this book and the four other books that I’ve written. It’s to try and resurrect this stuff because it’s so little-known. I’ve talked to a number of parapsychologists and they don’t know it themselves. I remember one who didn’t even know who Frederick Myers was. You talk about Leonora Piper, Sir Oliver Lodge, or Gladys Osborne Leonard, they’re all names they recognize but they don’t know any of the history. I don’t know what they teach them when they’re pursuing their degrees in parapsychology but they seem to avoid the early stuff.

Alex Tsakiris: Well, parapsychology formally as it’s taught has become really anomalous psychology. It’s why people believe weird things. That’s where parapsychology is really being taken, so it’s not surprising that they’re not interested in history.

But from another perspective it is interesting how we, in our modern age, in our iPhone, Internet age, feel a complete disconnect with even this history that’s a little more than 100 years ago. One of the things that I think your book does a great job of doing is connecting us with that time period and connecting us with the events that have gone on since then that become really smaller stepping-stones that help us see how the path has gone.

That’s how I felt from the book. I felt, ‘You know what? I’m really not that much different than these people. I don’t know how anyone could have done it any different than they did.’ So what are your thoughts on our connection or our lack of connection with this time period?

Mike Tymn: I agree with you that most of this has been filed away in dust-covered cabinets and people just don’t know about it. Part of the reason is not only because of the scientific fundamentalists but the religious fundamentalists. They oppose it as much as scientific fundamentalists. They read things in the Old Testament, that the dead know nothing and stay away from speaking with the dead and so forth so you’ve got the scientific fundamentalists on one side and the religious fundamentalists on the other side and not much left in the middle. That’s why we don’t know about it today.

I have a very good friend who’s a lawyer. He’s a Born-Again Christian. When I start talking to him about this he thinks I’m representing the Devil. He fears for my salvation because I believe that you can communicate with spirits. This guy’s a lawyer—he’s almost a judge.

Alex Tsakiris: You’ve chronicled this history and you’ve really gone much further in the book, Resurrecting Leonora Piper. Are you a believer in a pattern? Is there a direction that this is going? And is it being directed by someone or something?

Mike Tymn: I think the early spirit communication was directed by the spirits themselves. There were messages coming through through a number of very credible mediums that indicated that Benjamin Franklin, working with Emanuel Swedenborg, is the one who figured out how to communicate by means of raps. You know, whatever it took to get these raps through from the Other Side. It was Ben Franklin and Emanuel Swedenborg who figured it out.

There were a number of other messages indicating that there is a hierarchy of spirits there on the Other Side who were directing this and the problem was that the higher spirits had a more difficult time communicating with us than the lower spirits because they’re at a very much higher vibration level. So they have to come down through the various levels of vibration and they have to use lower-level spirits to get through to us.

There was one message that came through from Imperator. He was supposedly a high spirit that communicated with William Stainton Moses back during the 1880s. He said, “We misjudged. We felt we would be able to get this information through better than we have. We didn’t realize there was going to be so much interference in the lower levels among spirits and so much rejection by your scientists or asking for better explanations.”

There were indications they were beginning to pull back after that. I think that’s what happened. I think they just said there was no point. There was a lot of physical mediumship going on and many genuine mediums were being disparaged and called cheats because people didn’t understand what was going on. It was just beyond their comprehension that there was ectoplasm and there were materialized beings emerging out of this ectoplasm.

In the meantime there were actual frauds that became involved and people couldn’t tell the difference between frauds and the genuine mediums. So I think the spirit world pulled back.

Alex Tsakiris: That explanation always feels a little bit hollow. I don’t know if it’s true; it may be true but it feels a little bit lacking in the same way that I’ve started to delve into the extraterrestrial hypothesis because it’s this area where there’s an overwhelming amount of evidence for a long period of time. Many credible people have come forward and said, “Hey, this has happened. There’s this extended consciousness. We connect with these other beings.”

Then you have the whole psychedelic field and their research matches up with that. And you have the DMT stuff and Dr. Rick Strassman and people in the Amazon who are seeing aliens the same way that these people are seeing aliens. There’s this whole body of extended consciousness and you again run into this same kind of problem, which is if there’s this extended consciousness of other beings—we’ll call them aliens—why aren’t they landing on the White House lawn?

You could say the same thing with our spirits here. Are they really so limited that they can’t communicate with us in a more effective way? We have all these folks that come forward as channelers or as people who have this special connection with these spirits and say, “Hey, here it is. Here’s everything you need to know.” And they’re often contradictory. One contradicts another.

I just talked to Chris Carter. He’s written an excellent book and in part of our conversation he said, “I’ve come to the conclusion that we reincarnate three to four times,” because one of the sources he had he felt was very credible and that was their information. Well, that idea is contradicted by any number of near-death experience accounts, medium accounts, and other Gnostic texts that will tell you that that’s not at all true.

So those are the kinds of explanations that even for the open-minded person I think creates a lot of confusion and a lot of uncertainty. Do you know where I’m heading there?

Mike Tymn: I understand that. The other thing I was going to say is that I’m not sure we’re supposed to know with certainty. One quote that I’ve cited a number of times in several of my books comes from Victor Hugo’s research back in the 1850s. He was sitting with a number of mediums and he asked whoever he was communicating with through this one medium, he asked why it was so difficult and why doesn’t God better reveal himself?

Actually, it was Martin Luther that was communicating at the time and Martin Luther replied, “Because doubt is the instrument which forges the human spirit. If the day were to come when the human spirit no longer doubted, the human soul would fly off and leave the plough behind for it would have acquired wings. The earth would be fallow. Now God is the sower and man is the harvester. The celestial seed demands that the human ploughshare remain in the furrow of life.”

So in effect what he was saying is that if we knew everything for sure it would take away a lot of the challenges and the reasons we’re here living this Earthly life and it would hinder our progress. So I guess that’s the answer. We’re not meant to know for sure but we can at least have some assurance. I keep saying we’re never going to get absolute proof that consciousness survives death but we can at least move up to the 99% belief level.

Alex Tsakiris: Fair enough. I wonder if we don’t also run into a problem when we put “we” in there instead of “I.” One of the conclusions I’ve come to is that this is about each person’s personal journey. Soul journey if you want to go there. But your journey through understanding and advancing yourself and trying to understand. So I often wonder if we start saying “we” and start generalizing and saying, “This is how all people…” I don’t know. I don’t know how anyone else is. I’m on my own little path, my own little journey. It may be relatable to you and to other people but it may just be the way God, for lack of a better term, has set things up to play out for me.

Mike Tymn: I think so. I agree.

Alex Tsakiris: Well, Mike, it’s been great. This is a great book that people should really check out. It’s Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife. It’s fascinating to just discover these great minds and how they handled some of the same questions that we seem to be wrestling with over and over again today. A great book.

Thanks again for joining me, Mike.

Mike Tymn: Thanks very much for having me on, Alex. I appreciate it.

N/A

Piper was born in 1857, not 1859.

N/A

Piper was born in 1857, not 1859.

Typhon

Also the forgotten golden of magic spanned this time.Magicians were promoting more of the mediumistic beliefs in their acts before they got on the bandwagon of Houdini’s of debunking. As for the ectoplasm stuff.Its like Shirley Maclaine has said about the truth of fruit.Sometimes you have to pull it out of a limb.

Whocares

“Sometimes you have to pull it out of a limb.”
Would you like to explain the expression?

Typhon

You can interpret it anyway you wish, since we all create our own reality.To get a real insight to Shirleys philosophy I would suggest you watch the movie Two Mules For Sister Sarah.

Dsdversbe Strike

Careful Typhon, you might anger a few people. According to many atheists, one cannot create reality as reality is reality and objective.

Forests

Nonsense mate, magicians have always rejected mediumship. The entire basis of mediumship is just conjurer tricks, magicians can re-create them. Joseph Dunninger one of the worlds best mentalists exposed mediumship tricks, you can read an article about him here, he also debunked the claims of the spiritualist Oliver Lodge:

For those who believe no explanation is necessary,for those who do not none will suffice.I was with a group of magicians on Halloween watching Gellar’s show which proved to be interesting.Whats your take on Callahan and Angel.?

Typhon

Dunninger was not part of the Golden Age.I was referring more to the Davenport Brothers for instance. Dunninger was good though,as well as Anneman.

Typhon

Also the forgotten golden of magic spanned this time.Magicians were promoting more of the mediumistic beliefs in their acts before they got on the bandwagon of Houdini’s of debunking. As for the ectoplasm stuff.Its like Shirley Maclaine has said about the truth of fruit.Sometimes you have to pull it out of a limb.

Whocares

“Sometimes you have to pull it out of a limb.”
Would you like to explain the expression?

Typhon

You can interpret it anyway you wish, since we all create our own reality.To get a real insight to Shirleys philosophy I would suggest you watch the movie Two Mules For Sister Sarah.

Dsdversbe Strike

Careful Typhon, you might anger a few people. According to many atheists, one cannot create reality as reality is reality and objective.

Ho, hum, another person to make a dollar from the gullible. Balance should not be underrated. If we overlook the counterfactuals we are just airing our prejudices.

“Controls

As with other mediums of the era, Piper claimed the use of spirit guides or “controls” in trance. In some of Piper’s early sittings her contol Walter Scott made absurd statements about the planets. He claimed beautiful creatures live inside Venus and the Sun is populated by “dreadful looking creatures” which he described as monkeys that live in caves made out of sand and mud.[13]

Among her controls was a personality referred to as G.P., who was eventually revealed to be George Pellew, a writer who had died in New York City and a friend of Richard Hodgson.[14] Another was called “Phinuit” who was purportedly a French doctor. Phinuit’s French was limited to salutations like “Bonjour” and “Au revoir” and had little apparent knowledge both of the French language and medicine. According to some accounts, medical people were surprised Phinuit did not know the French or Latin names for the many remedies Piper advised for her sitters, and Phinuit’s historical existence could not be verified by SPR investigations.[15]

Among other spirit guides she claimed were assuming control of her were a young Indian girl named Chlorine, Martin Luther, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, Henry Longfellow,Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington.[14] Piper claimed to have no memory regarding her sittings.[16]

In an experiment to test if Piper’s controls were purely fictitious the psychologist G. Stanley Hall invented a niece called Bessie Beals and asked Piper’s ‘control’ to get in touch with it. Bessie appeared, answered questions and accepted Dr. Hall as her uncle.[17]

Confession

In 1901, Piper published an article “Mrs. Piper’s Plain Statement” in the New York Herald. In the article she announced her separation from the SPR, denied being a Spiritualist and wrote “I must truthfully say that I do not believe that spirits of the dead have spoken through me when I have been in the trance state”.[18] She also wrote that she believed telepathymay explain her mediumship and that her “spirit controls” were “an unconscious expression of my subliminal self”.[19]”

How embarrassing for Alex and Mike if the above was given the light of day in their self-serving tete a tete

Leprechaun Hunter

My post has been truncated. I wasn’t aware of a word limit given some posts I’ve seen here in the past . But, hey, let’s not give up…

According to some accounts, medical people were surprised Phinuit did not know the French or Latin names for the many remedies Piper advised for her sitters, and Phinuit’s historical existence could not be verified by SPR investigations.[15]

Among other spirit guides she claimed were assuming control of her were a young Indian girl named Chlorine, Martin Luther, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, Henry Longfellow,Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington.[14] Piper claimed to have no memory regarding her sitting

In an experiment to test if Piper’s controls were purely fictitious the psychologist G. Stanley Hall invented a niece called Bessie Beals and asked Piper’s ‘control’ to get in touch with it. Bessie appeared, answered questions and accepted Dr. Hall as her uncle.[17]

Confession

In 1901, Piper published an article “Mrs. Piper’s Plain Statement” in the New York Herald. In the article she announced her separation from the SPR, denied being a Spiritualist and wrote “I must truthfully say that I do not believe that spirits of the dead have spoken through me when I have been in the trance state”.[18] She also wrote that she believed telepathymay explain her mediumship and that her “spirit controls” were “an unconscious expression of my subliminal self”.[19]

Oh Wikipedia – so it must be true! At least remove the footnote references

Leprechaun Hunter

And Wikipedia only stocks falsehoods, eh Kingtal? The sources as you pointed out, albeit for a different purpose, have been cited by the author of the Wiki article. Now, if you want to dismiss it all as false, prove it. Saying it is on Wiki makes it worthless or wrong is just blind prejudice on your part ,Kingtal.

Prove that Leonora’s confession about not being in communication with any spirits is wrong. Show me that she never made a written statement in the said paper.

Of course, you won’t because you want to believe at all costs.

Kingtal

Give me a few months to take the time and effort to read some original sources (and I might just start with Mike Tymn’s book) – and I’ll come up with an original written response, the product of my own intellectual effort, that requires no uncredited copying of other sources.

You can choose to believe that this is true in all cases, and I have no doubt it’s true in some. But I’ve heard accounts from friends and family of mine that are truly inexplicable. Someone can always choose to disbelieve no matter what the circumstances are, and that’s fine. It’s easy to be that way because this sort of thing doesn’t work the way we want it to. I used to be that way myself. But all it takes is one occurence of true mediumship for it to become real. Remember that. Just one.

Dsdversbe Strike

The problem is wiki articles are changed over and over again by people with biases. Like look at how much christian or atheism as been changed to fit their writer’s opinion.

Want a cited article? I can produce billions. I can produce billions correlating atheists to child molesters and post it on wiki. I guess that would be true wouldn’t it?

Kingtal

Leprechaun – 2 comments:
1. This is what you posted in response to the interview with Dr Beischel:
“I find it difficult to believe that someone can be just given a name and then reveal specific information on a particular person who is kept hidden from the researcher and the medium. How many Jims have died or are alive?”
This is a great example of the distinction between scepticism, as a healthy and fundamentally necessary part of the scientific method, and scepticism as an ideology.
Your opinion, and I mean no insult by this, is irrelevant in the face of statistically significant information correlations in triple blind experiments. The correlation either exists in a statistically significant fashion, or it does not. That’s the science part.
The ideology part is the bit that allows you to make statements
predicated with “I find it difficult to believe…” without having looked at Dr Beischel’s published data in the journals.

2. On the apparent absurdities and inaccuracies of revealed information from “the other side”, there are very interesting parallels with some of the plainly wrong information told to UFO contactees. The actual methods of communication, as between UFO and human, and dead person and sitter, are something we know nothing about. We make assumptions that the “other” is either far more intelligent, or has some access to truth that we do not have.

We know not whether, or what type of filters are in place through which that information passes. We don’t know whether the misinformation is part of a trickster phenomena, the riddle serving some other purpose not presently understood.

Grant Cameron, a UFO researcher, recently noted on this program that the last thing anyone needs are more lights in the sky or words of wisdom from extraterrestrials. The time has come for a new
language, or a new method for gleaning the signal from the noise. It’s possible that that language may not be linear, may not involve causality as we understand, nor logic as we know it.

It’s possible that the same metaphor applies to this area of communication with the “the other side”.

Leprechaun Hunter

So, we’re not allowed to make any inquiry into how this fantastic communication occurs, Kingtal? And it is fantastic. So of all the millions of spirits over there, somehow they know what Bruce you’re talking about and can get the one that is being hidden through the double-blind experiment.

A statistically significant correlation means squat. It could be an artifact of an insufficient number of trials. I could toss 100 heads in a row, yet given sufficiently more time it would revert back to chance of 50/50. Now, I bet Beischel is returning something just hovering over chance and I wouldn’t put much stock in it for the reason I just gave.

I would also say that correlation can happen without any causal connection. You could map a correlation between inflation and rising global temperatures and it’s just coincidence without any causal connection.

But say there is something solid in her finding, which I deny, then how do you think it could be explained? If I asked you to give me details about Tom and you rattled off some specifics, I would have to think that those specifics aren’t peculiar to the Tom I know. And you would know that you have no idea about the Tom I know.

If all that doesn’t ring alarm bells for you and you can blithely dismiss it as blind skepticism then your brains dropped out of your head a long time ago, Kingtal.

Kingtal

1. Inquire all you want, but the researchers in this field haven’t, and make no claim, to have discovered how the communication works. Noone is making any claims in this regard. Just stick to the data on the accuracy of the information being conveyed – that’s the science bit, and the speculation on the 3 possible explanations (super psi, Akashic records, or survival of personality) is just for fun.
2. Every comment you make reveals the fact that YOU HAVEN”T LOOKED AT THE DATA. YOU HAVEN’T READ THE JOURNAL ARTICLES.
3. You base your denial not on any understanding of the research but on your a priori conclusion that you reached years ago based on whatever life experiences you’ve had. That’s not science, its prejudice.
4. This entire discussion is basically pointless unless and until you make the effort to look at the data. Truly.
And there is no need for personal attacks. Ad hominen arguments are hoary chestnuts in the skeptic’s arsenal – though at least it motivated me to respond to your post

N/A

Leperchaun, you are leaving out so much (and the information you presented is so misleading) that I don’t even know where to begin. When I have more time, I will explain the many problems with your wiki citation.

N/A

This is irritating. I have replied with some detail repeatedly, but my post keeps getting deleted and/or fails to even get published. What’s going on here? Leperchaun, feel free to email me at [email protected] and I will explain why the wiki article is misleadiing.

Mediumship has been debunked, It offers no evidence for an afterlife. It is explained mostly by fraud, and the rest by psychology. If people actually read some scientific papers then they wouldn’t believe in this sillyness, but they have become duped by dishonest spiritualist books which fabricate, lie and distort the real facts. At the end of the day authors like Tymn make money out of it, so they don’t care if they are lieing to their customers or not. There always will be gullible people and men like Tymn feed off of that, dishonest that is what it is. If he spent just a day reading the debunking of Piper by Dr Tuckett he would be closer to the truth but he already admitted he does not read books which contradict spiritualism. He is not interested in truth. He has made his mind up from the start and no matter what the evidence will paint a false picture that mediumship has been proven and find a way to believe. They call this true believer syndrome.

Kingtal

You haven’t read a single journal article on the accuracy of reported information through medium channels. Start with Dr Julie Beischel’s book, understand the triple blind protocols in place to ensure that there is no connection b/w sitter and medium, then read the published statistical analysis from the Windbridge Institue on the likelihood of the reported information being correct.

I invite you to do as I suggest and then come back and elaborate on your explanation for the phenomena as “mostly fraud, and the rest by psychology” Actually do some research in the area so that you can claim intellectual honesty in your opinion.

BTW what “scientific papers” did you have in mind? Name one.

Forests

Kingtal I don’t read spiritualist books anymore, they are dishonest, cannot be trusted and they fabricate the facts and promote lies. Read some science instead.

If mediumship had been scientifically proven it would be all over the news and there would be a revolution in science. It would be in every scientific journal around the world. No such thing has happened.

If mediumship is true then it should be done in light conditions with scientific controls in scientific conditions with multiple scientists and videocamera etc etc for people to watch. No such thing has ever happened. All we have is hearsay from little known dark rooms lol.

You want a peer reviewed paper on mediumship? You want a scientific investigation into mediumship with actual scientific controls? Well there was one, and the results were totally negative for mediumship! No suprise really.

An experiment (O’Keeffe and Wiseman, 2005) involving 5 mediums found no evidence to support the notion that the mediums under controlled conditions were able to demonstrate paranormal or mediumistic ability. You can read the paper here:

Thanks for the reference. I read the study and note it was based on a small sample of five subjects who had been through no previous accreditation process.

The authors also said “Alternatively, it is possible that genuine mediumistic abilities do exist, but that this
study failed to find evidence of them because, for example, the mediums involved in the experiment do not possess such abilities or the setting in which the study was conducted did not elicit such abilities.”

Dr Beischel noted that the methodology employed in the Wiseman study used (a) mediums who had not been previously tested to determine if they were able to perform accurately under normal mediumship or single-
blind conditions, (b) sitters who were not selected to be highly motivated to receive information purportedly
from their de- ceased loved ones and thus score the readings accurately, (c) a scoring system that did not foster detailed item-by-item analysis of the readings,
followed by meaningful summary scoring, and (4) experimental conditions that did not optimize the mediums’ potential to receive information (the
mediums performed five readings in 5.5 hours).

In the same study she noted statistically significant results on the accuracy of information conveyed by mediums in a quintuple blind situation. The findings
included significantly higher ratings for
intended versus control readings (p = 0.007, effect size = 0.5) and significant reading-choice results (p =0.01).

Hi Alex;
I much enjoyed your interview with Mike Tymes. In particular
the reply which was received by a medium from Martin Luther:
“Because doubt is the instrument which forges the human spirit. If the day were to come when the human spirit no longer doubted, the human soul would fly off and leave the plough behind for it would have acquired wings. The earth would be fallow. Now God is the sower and man is the harvester. The celestial seed demands that the human ploughshare remain in the furrow of life.”
This is brilliant and exactly how I think it is. Our trials in this world through the profound effects of God’s law of Karma, perhaps after several lifetimes eventually guide us to leading more compassionate, less selfish lives. We become wise and one at a time as you suspect and graduate into God’s celestial promised land.
I don’t think we will ever achieve 100% acceptance of spiritual life here. There are sent, or “sown” into this bootcamp constantly, ignorant new souls needing discipline. But those who seek, will find.
Thank you again. -Garry

Garry

Hi Alex;
I much enjoyed your interview with Mike Tymes. In particular
the reply which was received by a medium from Martin Luther:
“Because doubt is the instrument which forges the human spirit. If the day were to come when the human spirit no longer doubted, the human soul would fly off and leave the plough behind for it would have acquired wings. The earth would be fallow. Now God is the sower and man is the harvester. The celestial seed demands that the human ploughshare remain in the furrow of life.”
This is brilliant and exactly how I think it is. Our trials in this world through the profound effects of God’s law of Karma, perhaps after several lifetimes eventually guide us to leading more compassionate, less selfish lives. We become wise and one at a time as you suspect and graduate into God’s celestial promised land.
I don’t think we will ever achieve 100% acceptance of spiritual life here. There are sent, or “sown” into this bootcamp constantly, ignorant new souls needing discipline. But those who seek, will find.
Thank you again. -Garry

Forests

Leprechaun Hunter you are correct in your skepticism of Piper. Piper in a confession admitted that she was not in contact with spirits.

” In some of Piper’s early sittings her spirit contol Walter Scott made absurd statements about the planets. He claimed beautiful creatures live inside Venus and the Sun is populated by “dreadful looking creatures” which he described as monkeys that live in caves made out of sand and mud”

LOL! And people like Tymn believe Piper was in contact with spirits. Here is the full statement from one of Piper’s “spirits”:

When describing the sun Piper’s “spirit control” Walter Scott
said:

“we find it very warm and deserted like a deserted island. We wish
to find its inhabitants if there are any i.e. if it has any. Now we see what we
term monkeys, dreadful looking creatures, black extremely black, very wild. We
find they live in caves which are made in the sand or mud, clay etc.”

lol Tymn and other spiritualists you believe monkeys live in the sun? Piper’s “spirit controls” were nothing but purely fictitious personalities. Tymn’s book is dishonest, Piper was not in contact with spirits.

In 1901, Piper published an article “Mrs. Piper’s
Plain Statement” in the New York Herald. In the article she announced her
separation from the SPR, denied being a Spiritualist and wrote “I must
truthfully say that I do not believe that spirits of the dead have spoken
through me when I have been in the trance state”. She also wrote that her
“spirit controls” were “an unconscious expression of my subliminal self”.

You can find her statement online. It amazes me how someone can right an entire book claiming Piper communicated with spirits when she herself denied such a thing, and her “spirit controls” made silly comments.

Ivor Lloyd Tuckett who examined Piper’s mediumship in detail wrote it could be explained by “muscle-reading, fishing, guessing, hints obtained in the sitting, knowledge surreptitiously obtained, knowledge acquired in the interval between sittings and lastly, facts already within Mrs. Piper’s knowledge”.

Leprechaun hunter, you should debate Tymn on his blog. He bans skeptics very quickly (or the admins of his site do) I got banned for questioning why spirit mediums don’t report fish coming through in the seance room. No spiritualist has ever responded about bacteria, insects or planets either, they only claim humans survive death. Spiritualism is a perverse anthropocentric religion based on fraud.

No matter what evidence you give spiritualists such as Tymn against these old mediums, he still find a way to believe. An Interesting psychological study. He is what they call a true case of true believer syndrome.

Anyone who believes those cut outs were real spirits is not in reality, but Tymn believes they were lol. It is hard to take him seriously but he actually believes it, hes like a young earth creationist who believes jesus was in the garden of eden riding on a dinosaur lol. utter sillyness and lies lol
people such as yourself and me hunter are in the truth, we can sit back at the end of the day and know we have not been swindled by such lies, deceit and fraud. the joke of it all is that spiritualists such as tymn and other members of the skeptiko forum think they are scientific and rational and that it is the skeptics who have got it wrong lol.
o well let people believe in their fantasies, i enjoy some fantasies too but unlike these spiritualists i dont claim my fantasies are scientific !!

Michael Tymn = Dishonest! If Piper was alive today she would probably give you a slap Michael or sue you. 😮

http://www.facebook.com/javier.valdel Javier Valdel

Sure Mediumship are fraud but I wouldn´t cry nor call anyone guillible for that matter.
Atheist crying babys are annoying as hell
Linving in a careless universe with no purpose your self-attributed mision of open other people eyes is futile. Live and let live

forests

Interesting valdel what does atheism have to do with anything in this discussion? Most parapsychologists have been atheists. Perhaps you should study your own field.

Lol, so atheism = no purpose? How does that make any sense? How did you come to that silly conclusion? Who is in control of our lives at the end of the day? Ourselves, we don’t need any “God” to have a purpose. Just for the record, I am not an atheist, so am not sure why you brought that up. But let me guess you are another American Christian. The entire Bible was a hoax, all the stuff in it was fabricated over a number of years by different writers. See the book The Forgery of the Old Testament and Other Essays by Joseph McCabe.

http://www.facebook.com/javier.valdel Javier Valdel

Im not a Christian so your criticism of God and the Bible doesn´t bother me.
In the other hand, Richard Dawkins, the atheism pope himself says that we live in a universe which
has ‘no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indiference.
So the atheism=no purpose is not a personal conclusion but one of the main basis of the atheist philosophy defended by his most representative spokepersons

Sure Mediumship are fraud but I wouldn´t cry nor call anyone guillible for that matter.
Atheist crying babys are annoying as hell
Linving in a careless universe with no purpose your self-attributed mision of open other people eyes is futile. Live and let live

Penelope

Who are you to say what William James really believed or think you can call him a ‘wimp’ because he didn’t come to the conclusions you wanted him to. He was being objective and honest.

http://www.facebook.com/javier.valdel Javier Valdel

Its very funny how the listeners of this show are being insulted by the fanatic atheist community and they are incapable to defend themselves. Maybe in their hearts they consider all this stuff bullshit or simply dont have the guts to fight for the right of have their personal worldwiews.
Well its OK, keep voting down my post and let the intolerant skeptoid community make laugh of you instead of confront them 😉

http://www.facebook.com/javier.valdel Javier Valdel

Its very funny how the listeners of this show are being insulted by the fanatic atheist community and they are incapable to defend themselves. Maybe in their hearts they consider all this stuff bullshit or simply dont have the guts to fight for the right of have their personal worldwiews.
Well its OK, keep voting down my post and let the intolerant skeptoid community make laugh of you instead of confront them 😉

http://www.facebook.com/javier.valdel Javier Valdel

And for the atheist cry babies, Im not a christian nor a occultist, Im an Agnostic atheist, but your intolerant, childish and disrespectful behavior towards other people´s personal worldwiews are embarrassing for sure.

http://www.facebook.com/javier.valdel Javier Valdel

Truht hurts asshole fanatical atheists right? 😀

http://www.facebook.com/javier.valdel Javier Valdel

And for the atheist cry babies, Im not a christian nor a occultist, Im an Agnostic atheist, but your intolerant, childish and disrespectful behavior towards other people´s personal worldwiews are embarrassing for sure.

Jarro

Mrs Piper made it clear that she was uncertain as to the source of any alleged communication & that she did not consent to the paper writing this up as a confession which it was not.

“I did not make any such statement as that published in the New York Herald to the effect that spirits of the departed do not control me … My opinion is to-day as it was eighteen years ago. Spirits of the departed may have controlled me and they may not. I confess that I do not know. I have not changed … I make no change in my relations.”

So much for a confession – sounds to me like she is neutral on the matter. As to her obvious mistakes/fantasy type communications about monkeys in the sun etc, fictictious persons, so what? Hodgson made it clear that when in trance she was highly suggestible so was it any wonder that she responded to various requests for information even falsely requested.

Why do debunkers always focus onthe weakest areas of her mediumship? The true test of any sceptical explanation is its ability to deal with the very best of the evidence. Come on fellas, deal with the Pellew case, or the proxy sitters evidence that Hodgson mentions in his reports to the SPR. As for Dr Tuckett his findings are based entirely on the 6th proceedings of the SPR report when Piper came to the UK, yet the very best evidence was obtained in the USA under Hodgson. He doesn’t deal with this. We just get a catalogue of the weakest evidence……so what does this prove? nothing at all. Poor evidence dismisses itself with very little effort. Funny how the best data is ignored. You guys have taken a leaf out of the Stan Friedman pseudo sceptic manual.

1. Dont bother me with the fatcts my minds made up

2. If you cant attack the data, attack the person, its easier

3. What the public doesnt know I wont tell them

4. Do you research by proclamation, investigation is too much trouble.

Jarro

Mrs Piper made it clear that she was uncertain as to the source of any alleged communication & that she did not consent to the paper writing this up as a confession which it was not.

“I did not make any such statement as that published in the New York Herald to the effect that spirits of the departed do not control me … My opinion is to-day as it was eighteen years ago. Spirits of the departed may have controlled me and they may not. I confess that I do not know. I have not changed … I make no change in my relations.”

So much for a confession – sounds to me like she is neutral on the matter. As to her obvious mistakes/fantasy type communications about monkeys in the sun etc, fictictious persons, so what? Hodgson made it clear that when in trance she was highly suggestible so was it any wonder that she responded to various requests for information even falsely requested.

Why do debunkers always focus onthe weakest areas of her mediumship? The true test of any sceptical explanation is its ability to deal with the very best of the evidence. Come on fellas, deal with the Pellew case, or the proxy sitters evidence that Hodgson mentions in his reports to the SPR. As for Dr Tuckett his findings are based entirely on the 6th proceedings of the SPR report when Piper came to the UK, yet the very best evidence was obtained in the USA under Hodgson. He doesn’t deal with this. We just get a catalogue of the weakest evidence……so what does this prove? nothing at all. Poor evidence dismisses itself with very little effort. Funny how the best data is ignored. You guys have taken a leaf out of the Stan Friedman pseudo sceptic manual.

1. Dont bother me with the fatcts my minds made up

2. If you cant attack the data, attack the person, its easier

3. What the public doesnt know I wont tell them

4. Do you research by proclamation, investigation is too much trouble.

Jarro

Mrs Piper made it clear that she was uncertain as to the source of any alleged communication & that she did not consent to the paper writing this up as a confession which it was not.

“I did not make any such statement as that published in the New York Herald to the effect that spirits of the departed do not control me … My opinion is to-day as it was eighteen years ago. Spirits of the departed may have controlled me and they may not. I confess that I do not know. I have not changed … I make no change in my relations.”

So much for a confession – sounds to me like she is neutral on the matter. As to her obvious mistakes/fantasy type communications about monkeys in the sun etc, fictictious persons, so what? Hodgson made it clear that when in trance she was highly suggestible so was it any wonder that she responded to various requests for information even falsely requested.

Why do debunkers always focus onthe weakest areas of her mediumship? The true test of any sceptical explanation is its ability to deal with the very best of the evidence. Come on fellas, deal with the Pellew case, or the proxy sitters evidence that Hodgson mentions in his reports to the SPR. As for Dr Tuckett his findings are based entirely on the 6th proceedings of the SPR report when Piper came to the UK, yet the very best evidence was obtained in the USA under Hodgson. He doesn’t deal with this. We just get a catalogue of the weakest evidence……so what does this prove? nothing at all. Poor evidence dismisses itself with very little effort. Funny how the best data is ignored. You guys have taken a leaf out of the Stan Friedman pseudo sceptic manual.

1. Dont bother me with the facts my minds made up

2. If you cant attack the data, attack the person, its easier

3. What the public doesnt know I wont tell them

4. Do you research by proclamation, investigation is too much trouble.

Jarro

Mrs Piper made it clear that she was uncertain as to the source of any alleged communication & that she did not consent to the paper writing this up as a confession which it was not.

“I did not make any such statement as that published in the New York Herald to the effect that spirits of the departed do not control me … My opinion is to-day as it was eighteen years ago. Spirits of the departed may have controlled me and they may not. I confess that I do not know. I have not changed … I make no change in my relations.”

So much for a confession – sounds to me like she is neutral on the matter. As to her obvious mistakes/fantasy type communications about monkeys in the sun etc, fictictious persons, so what? Hodgson made it clear that when in trance she was highly suggestible so was it any wonder that she responded to various requests for information even falsely requested.

Why do debunkers always focus onthe weakest areas of her mediumship? The true test of any sceptical explanation is its ability to deal with the very best of the evidence. Come on fellas, deal with the Pellew case, or the proxy sitters evidence that Hodgson mentions in his reports to the SPR. As for Dr Tuckett his findings are based entirely on the 6th proceedings of the SPR report when Piper came to the UK, yet the very best evidence was obtained in the USA under Hodgson. He doesn’t deal with this. We just get a catalogue of the weakest evidence……so what does this prove? nothing at all. Poor evidence dismisses itself with very little effort. Funny how the best data is ignored. You guys have taken a leaf out of the Stan Friedman pseudo sceptic manual.

1. Dont bother me with the facts my minds made up

2. If you cant attack the data, attack the person, its easier

3. What the public doesnt know I wont tell them

4. Do you research by proclamation, investigation is too much trouble.

Dsdversbe Strike

research by wiki, according to lep, is 100% better than research by science

guest

im pretty sure that in your interview with Chris Carter, he didn’t say that he personally believed that we only reincarnate 3 or 4 times, he was just passing on what Myers supposedly said in his medium transcribed book.

guest

im pretty sure that in your interview with Chris Carter, he didn’t say that he personally believed that we only reincarnate 3 or 4 times, he was just passing on what Myers supposedly said in his medium transcribed book.

Leprechaun Hunter

My post has been truncated. I wasn’t aware of a word limit given some posts I’ve seen here in the past . But, hey, let’s not give up…

According to some accounts, medical people were surprised Phinuit did not know the French or Latin names for the many remedies Piper advised for her sitters, and Phinuit’s historical existence could not be verified by SPR investigations.[15]

Among other spirit guides she claimed were assuming control of her were a young Indian girl named Chlorine, Martin Luther, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, Henry Longfellow,Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington.[14] Piper claimed to have no memory regarding her sitting

In an experiment to test if Piper’s controls were purely fictitious the psychologist G. Stanley Hall invented a niece called Bessie Beals and asked Piper’s ‘control’ to get in touch with it. Bessie appeared, answered questions and accepted Dr. Hall as her uncle.[17]

Confession

In 1901, Piper published an article “Mrs. Piper’s Plain Statement” in the New York Herald. In the article she announced her separation from the SPR, denied being a Spiritualist and wrote “I must truthfully say that I do not believe that spirits of the dead have spoken through me when I have been in the trance state”.[18] She also wrote that she believed telepathymay explain her mediumship and that her “spirit controls” were “an unconscious expression of my subliminal self”.[19]

Leprechaun – 2 comments:
1. This is what you posted in response to the interview with Dr Beischel:
“I find it difficult to believe that someone can be just given a name and then reveal specific information on a particular person who is kept hidden from the researcher and the medium. How many Jims have died or are alive?”
This is a great example of the distinction between scepticism, as a healthy and fundamentally necessary part of the scientific method, and scepticism as an ideology.
Your opinion, and I mean no insult by this, is irrelevant in the face of statistically significant information correlations in triple blind experiments. The correlation either exists in a statistically significant fashion, or it does not. That’s the science part.
The ideology part is the bit that allows you to make statements
predicated with “I find it difficult to believe…” without having looked at Dr Beischel’s published data in the journals.

2. On the apparent absurdities and inaccuracies of revealed information from “the other side”, there are very interesting parallels with some of the plainly wrong information told to UFO contactees. The actual methods of communication, as between UFO and human, and dead person and sitter, are something we know nothing about. We make assumptions that the “other” is either far more intelligent, or has some access to truth that we do not have.

We know not whether, or what type of filters are in place through which that information passes. We don’t know whether the misinformation is part of a trickster phenomena, the riddle serving some other purpose not presently understood.

Grant Cameron, a UFO researcher, recently noted on this program that the last thing anyone needs are more lights in the sky or words of wisdom from extraterrestrials. The time has come for a new
language, or a new method for gleaning the signal from the noise. It’s possible that that language may not be linear, may not involve causality as we understand, nor logic as we know it.

It’s possible that the same metaphor applies to this area of communication with the “the other side”.

N/A

Leperchaun, you are leaving out so much (and the information you presented is so misleading) that I don’t even know where to begin. When I have more time, I will explain the many problems with your wiki citation.

N/A

This is irritating. I have replied with some detail repeatedly, but my post keeps getting deleted and/or fails to even get published. What’s going on here? Leperchaun, feel free to email me at [email protected] and I will explain why the wiki article is misleadiing.

Mediumship has been debunked, It offers no evidence for an afterlife. It is explained mostly by fraud, and the rest by psychology. If people actually read some scientific papers then they wouldn’t believe in this sillyness, but they have become duped by dishonest spiritualist books which fabricate, lie and distort the real facts. At the end of the day authors like Tymn make money out of it, so they don’t care if they are lieing to their customers or not. There always will be gullible people and men like Tymn feed off of that, dishonest that is what it is. If he spent just a day reading the debunking of Piper by Dr Tuckett he would be closer to the truth but he already admitted he does not read books which contradict spiritualism. He is not interested in truth. He has made his mind up from the start and no matter what the evidence will paint a false picture that mediumship has been proven and find a way to believe. They call this true believer syndrome.

Leprechaun Hunter

My mistake. It’s all there.

Kingtal

Oh Wikipedia – so it must be true! At least remove the footnote references

Leprechaun Hunter

So, we’re not allowed to make any inquiry into how this fantastic communication occurs, Kingtal? And it is fantastic. So of all the millions of spirits over there, somehow they know what Bruce you’re talking about and can get the one that is being hidden through the double-blind experiment.

A statistically significant correlation means squat. It could be an artifact of an insufficient number of trials. I could toss 100 heads in a row, yet given sufficiently more time it would revert back to chance of 50/50. Now, I bet Beischel is returning something just hovering over chance and I wouldn’t put much stock in it for the reason I just gave.

I would also say that correlation can happen without any causal connection. You could map a correlation between inflation and rising global temperatures and it’s just coincidence without any causal connection.

But say there is something solid in her finding, which I deny, then how do you think it could be explained? If I asked you to give me details about Tom and you rattled off some specifics, I would have to think that those specifics aren’t peculiar to the Tom I know. And you would know that you have no idea about the Tom I know.

If all that doesn’t ring alarm bells for you and you can blithely dismiss it as blind skepticism then your brains dropped out of your head a long time ago, Kingtal.

Leprechaun Hunter

And Wikipedia only stocks falsehoods, eh Kingtal? The sources as you pointed out, albeit for a different purpose, have been cited by the author of the Wiki article. Now, if you want to dismiss it all as false, prove it. Saying it is on Wiki makes it worthless or wrong is just blind prejudice on your part ,Kingtal.

Prove that Leonora’s confession about not being in communication with any spirits is wrong. Show me that she never made a written statement in the said paper.

Of course, you won’t because you want to believe at all costs.

Kingtal

1. Inquire all you want, but the researchers in this field haven’t, and make no claim, to have discovered how the communication works. Noone is making any claims in this regard. Just stick to the data on the accuracy of the information being conveyed – that’s the science bit, and the speculation on the 3 possible explanations (super psi, Akashic records, or survival of personality) is just for fun.
2. Every comment you make reveals the fact that YOU HAVEN”T LOOKED AT THE DATA. YOU HAVEN’T READ THE JOURNAL ARTICLES.
3. You base your denial not on any understanding of the research but on your a priori conclusion that you reached years ago based on whatever life experiences you’ve had. That’s not science, its prejudice.
4. This entire discussion is basically pointless unless and until you make the effort to look at the data. Truly.
And there is no need for personal attacks. Ad hominen arguments are hoary chestnuts in the skeptic’s arsenal – though at least it motivated me to respond to your post

Kingtal

Give me a few months to take the time and effort to read some original sources (and I might just start with Mike Tymn’s book) – and I’ll come up with an original written response, the product of my own intellectual effort, that requires no uncredited copying of other sources.

Dsdversbe Strike

The problem is wiki articles are changed over and over again by people with biases. Like look at how much christian or atheism as been changed to fit their writer’s opinion.

Want a cited article? I can produce billions. I can produce billions correlating atheists to child molesters and post it on wiki. I guess that would be true wouldn’t it?

For those who believe no explanation is necessary,for those who do not none will suffice.I was with a group of magicians on Halloween watching Gellar’s show which proved to be interesting.Whats your take on Callahan and Angel.?

Typhon

Dunninger was not part of the Golden Age.I was referring more to the Davenport Brothers for instance. Dunninger was good though,as well as Anneman.

Kingtal

You haven’t read a single journal article on the accuracy of reported information through medium channels. Start with Dr Julie Beischel’s book, understand the triple blind protocols in place to ensure that there is no connection b/w sitter and medium, then read the published statistical analysis from the Windbridge Institue on the likelihood of the reported information being correct.

I invite you to do as I suggest and then come back and elaborate on your explanation for the phenomena as “mostly fraud, and the rest by psychology” Actually do some research in the area so that you can claim intellectual honesty in your opinion.

BTW what “scientific papers” did you have in mind? Name one.

Forests

Kingtal I don’t read spiritualist books anymore, they are dishonest, cannot be trusted and they fabricate the facts and promote lies. Read some science instead.

If mediumship had been scientifically proven it would be all over the news and there would be a revolution in science. It would be in every scientific journal around the world. No such thing has happened.

If mediumship is true then it should be done in light conditions with scientific controls in scientific conditions with multiple scientists and videocamera etc etc for people to watch. No such thing has ever happened. All we have is hearsay from little known dark rooms lol.

You want a peer reviewed paper on mediumship? You want a scientific investigation into mediumship with actual scientific controls? Well there was one, and the results were totally negative for mediumship! No suprise really.

An experiment (O’Keeffe and Wiseman, 2005) involving 5 mediums found no evidence to support the notion that the mediums under controlled conditions were able to demonstrate paranormal or mediumistic ability. You can read the paper here:

Im not a Christian so your criticism of God and the Bible doesn´t bother me.
In the other hand, Richard Dawkins, the atheism pope himself says that we live in a universe which
has ‘no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indiference.
So the atheism=no purpose is not a personal conclusion but one of the main basis of the atheist philosophy defended by his most representative spokepersons

Can you offer anything to this discussion other than sweeping generalities? I pointed to scientific studies from journal articles, all of which are in pdf on the Windbridge Institute site. You choose to not even look at them. Ask yourself why.

Instead you refer to a non-specified investigation into the phenomena. Where’s the reference so the rest of know whether you are doing anything other than saying the first thing that comes into your head.

David Williams

Thanks for the reference. I read the study and note it was based on a small sample of five subjects who had been through no previous accreditation process.

The authors also said “Alternatively, it is possible that genuine mediumistic abilities do exist, but that this
study failed to find evidence of them because, for example, the mediums involved in the experiment do not possess such abilities or the setting in which the study was conducted did not elicit such abilities.”

Dr Beischel noted that the methodology employed in the Wiseman study used (a) mediums who had not been previously tested to determine if they were able to perform accurately under normal mediumship or single-
blind conditions, (b) sitters who were not selected to be highly motivated to receive information purportedly
from their de- ceased loved ones and thus score the readings accurately, (c) a scoring system that did not foster detailed item-by-item analysis of the readings,
followed by meaningful summary scoring, and (4) experimental conditions that did not optimize the mediums’ potential to receive information (the
mediums performed five readings in 5.5 hours).

In the same study she noted statistically significant results on the accuracy of information conveyed by mediums in a quintuple blind situation. The findings
included significantly higher ratings for
intended versus control readings (p = 0.007, effect size = 0.5) and significant reading-choice results (p =0.01).

1. The Journal of Science and Healing is not a scientific journal, it is a new age journal.

2. Gary Schwartz has been exposed as a fraud, so anything he says should not be trusted:

“On Fox News on the Geraldo at Large show, October 6, 2007, Geraldo Rivera and other investigators accused Schwartz as a fraud and that he had overstepped his position as a university researcher by requesting over three million dollars from a bereaved father who had lost his son. Schwartz had claimed to have contacted the spirit of a 25 year old man in the bathroom of his parents house and attempted to charge the family 3.5 million dollars for his mediumship services.”

Mrs Piper made it clear that she was uncertain as to the source of any alleged communication & that she did not consent to the paper writing this up as a confession which it was not.

“I did not make any such statement as that published in the New York Herald to the effect that spirits of the departed do not control me … My opinion is to-day as it was eighteen years ago. Spirits of the departed may have controlled me and they may not. I confess that I do not know. I have not changed … I make no change in my relations.”

So much for a confession – sounds to me like she is neutral on the matter. As to her obvious mistakes/fantasy type communications about monkeys in the sun etc, fictictious persons, so what? Hodgson made it clear that when in trance she was highly suggestible so was it any wonder that she responded to various requests for information even falsely requested.

Why do debunkers always focus onthe weakest areas of her mediumship? The true test of any sceptical explanation is its ability to deal with the very best of the evidence. Come on fellas, deal with the Pellew case, or the proxy sitters evidence that Hodgson mentions in his reports to the SPR. As for Dr Tuckett his findings are based entirely on the 6th proceedings of the SPR report when Piper came to the UK, yet the very best evidence was obtained in the USA under Hodgson. He doesn’t deal with this. We just get a catalogue of the weakest evidence……so what does this prove? nothing at all. Poor evidence dismisses itself with very little effort. Funny how the best data is ignored. You guys have taken a leaf out of the Stan Friedman pseudo sceptic manual.

1. Dont bother me with the facts my minds made up

2. If you cant attack the data, attack the person, its easier

3. What the public doesnt know I wont tell them

4. Do you research by proclamation, investigation is too much trouble.

TeddyOrwell

You can choose to believe that this is true in all cases, and I have no doubt it’s true in some. But I’ve heard accounts from friends and family of mine that are truly inexplicable. Someone can always choose to disbelieve no matter what the circumstances are, and that’s fine. It’s easy to be that way because this sort of thing doesn’t work the way we want it to. I used to be that way myself. But all it takes is one occurence of true mediumship for it to become real. Remember that. Just one.

Dsdversbe Strike

research by wiki, according to lep, is 100% better than research by science

Kingtal

typical skeptic’s logical fallacy – its called an ad hominen argument, or attacking the man rather than the argument. Address the data or don’t bother…